Study: Immigrant Birth Rate Falling Sharply

The birth rate fell twice as fast among immigrant women as it did among native-born women in seven years, raising doubts about the oft-promised role in-migration can play to defusing America’s demographic time bomb, according to a study.

The United States is aging, straining government-financed retirement programs and health care systems. Some have suggested that immigration can reverse that. Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush famously said at a Faith and Freedom Coalition conference in Washington in 2013 that “Immigrants are more fertile.”

But the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, drawing on U.S. Census Bureau data, found that the gap between immigrant and native women narrowed significantly between 2008 and 2015.

The study released Monday indicates that the immigrant birth rate in 2008 was 76 children per 1,000 women between the ages of 15 and 50. For natives, it was 55.2 children for 1,000 women in that age group.

[lz_table title=”Declining Immigrant Birth Rates” source=”Center for Immigration Studies”]Births per 1000 women*
|Year,Immigrants,Natives
2006,70.5,52.1
2007,72,51.9
2008,76,55.2
2009,75.2,54
2010,70.8,51.2
2011,67.9,51.3
2013,62.2,49.8
2014,61.2,49.9
2015,60.1,49.4
|
*Age 15 to 50
[/lz_table]

That figure dropped 20.9 percent among immigrants between then and 2015, when births per 1,000 women totaled 60.1. For natives, the rate dropped 10.5 percent, to 49.4 in 2015.

“Even though they make up a fairly large share of women in these child-bearing years, it’s not enough,” said Steven Camarota, who wrote the study.

Another way of examining the issue is total fertility rate, expressed by the average number of children each woman will have in her lifetime. That number has plunged as well, across all subgroups. For the entire U.S. population, it was 2.18 in 2008, falling to 1.82 in 2015.

The rate among native women fell from 2.07 to 1.75; among immigrants, it declined from 2.75 in 2008 to 2.16 in 2015.

David Bier, an immigration policy analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, reacted to the study by calling for the admission of even more migrants.

“Solution! More immigrants!” he tweeted.

“Fertility is declining throughout the world in almost every way.”

Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, said immigrants generally have higher birth rates than natives, but the second generation converges toward the national norm. That can be seen in the race and ethnicity data. The difference between the fertility rate of U.S.-born Hispanic women in 2015, 1.85, was just 0.1 higher than the rate for all native-born women.

“It’s falling very fast,” he said. “The second generation is not going to have a big impact on the fertility rate.”

The fertility rate has declined among all races and ethnicities since 2008. In 2014 and 2015 — for the first time — the fertility for U.S.-born blacks was below the rate for native-born whites.

Birth rates also fluctuate greatly depending on where the immigrants come from. The fertility rate among white immigrants, 1.99 in 2015, was not that far above the 1.82 rate of the entire population. And it was even lower for Asian immigrants, 1.76.

Meanwhile, black and Hispanic immigrants had much higher birth rates — 2.56 and 2.38, respectively.

But Camarota said the trend is clear, and it is global.

“Fertility is declining throughout the world in almost every way,” he said.

Camarota said immigrants are migrating to America at older ages, on average, than in previous generations, adding that immigrants living in America constantly age as well. He noted that 13 percent of immigrants are 65 or older, about the same percentage as in the total population of retirement-age residents.

Those factors, combined with lower birth rates, mean that immigration only marginally makes the U.S. population younger, said Camarota.

“You get everything,” he said. “You get more workers. You get more retirees.”

While immigration plays only a minor role in slowing the aging of America, it paradoxically is a significant driver of population growth in the United States, according to the think tank’s analysis of census data. Immigrants plus their U.S.-born children accounted for 30.2 million new U.S. residents between 2000 and 2015. That represents 76 percent of total population growth during that time.

[lz_related_box id=”847573″]

While some argue that the growing population immigrants maintain is good for the country, Camarota said that is only true if the immigrants on average produce more wealth than they cost in government services. Otherwise, he said, it costs money from the citizens and legal residents already living in the country.

One positive benefit of declining immigrant fertility rates, Camarota said, is that it reduces the net burden on taxpayers since families with large numbers of children tend to be poorer.

“That helps,” he said. “It means that, certainly, a slightly smaller fraction of children in immigrant households are living in poverty. That’s good.”

(photo credit, homepage image: Mexicanos Sin Fronteras, Flickr; photo credit, article image: Fibonacci Blue, Flickr)